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Pyrite Honors!
The results are in, and opening the honor vote to the larger list made for some interesting shifts in some of the votes — although not statistically significant shifts when it comes to the actual Pyrite* honor slate.
ALA definitely affected our voter pool (another note for next year, get all the voting done by the Thursday of ALA week), so we went down to only 35 voters (from nearly 70 for the Pyrite gold — can you have Pyrite gold? Hmmm), and it wasn’t exactly the same voter pool. However, the results show that this smaller and somewhat different pool was mostly in agreement with the original voter pool.
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Which gives us hope that Seraphina, which we love a LOT, does indeed have a chance at the RealPrintz (although we left it off our prediction list, given the challenge real fantasy has historically faced), since it continues to be the second most loved title for the Pyrite, first giving CNV something that resembled a run for its money and now sweeping the honor vote. Read on for details and the rest of the lineup.
Not surprisingly, looking back at the voting results for the Pyrite, the three titles vying for the most first place votes were The Brides of Rollrock Island, The Fault in Our Stars, and Seraphina, with Ask the Passengers and Bomb grabbing the next two places.
It’s in the second place votes that Seraphina pulled into the true consensus place, and it becomes clear that for Someday readers, Seraphina really is the second best book of the year by a fair margin. With the RealPrintz, we never know what the breakdown of the honor books really was, but it does make you wonder, doesn’t it? Brides pulled the second highest number of votes for the second honor slot, which continues to follow the lead of the Pyrite poll and the first honor book, but then things suddenly start to shift:
Ask the Passengers and — surprise! — Me & Earl & the Dying Girl? This is especially interesting as there were no second place votes for Fault, Me & Earl’s content sibling (and the book we think edged the wonderful Me & Earl out of many conversations — see earlier Honeycrisp/Pink Lady apple analogy).
Moving onto vote position number three (although not everyone voted for a third or fourth honor book), Seraphina is still in play with 15% of the 3rd place votes, and Bomb makes a strong appearance as the most popular third place choice (is that slightly oxymoronic?)
And finally, the fourth place votes, where Ask the Passengers makes a strong showing as the consensus title that everyone likes, but relatively few people seem to love, when it comes to Printz speculation. Still, those 4th place votes are worth 7 points here, and edged Askinto the last possible honor slot.
So in the end, the honor (nickel) books are Seraphina with 107 points (8-7-5-1), Brides of Rollrock Island with 87 (8-5-1-3), The Fault in Our Stars with 62 (8-0-1-3) and Ask the Passengers with 57 (3-4-3-7). (However, Bomb is nipping at Ask‘s heels with 50 points to Ask‘s 57, making it very clear just how much those 4th place votes mattered). The full point spread looks like this (click through for a larger image if you can’t read everything in this version):
A few thoughts:
Fault had edged out Brides for the fool’s gold vote by two points, but here fell behind by 15 points, while Seraphina and Ask remained in the same relative positions.
The next closest title after Bomb (which would be 5th) is Me & Earl & the Dying Girl, which earned approximately half the weighted total of Bomb. Earl was not included in the gold vote, but beat out other contenders that were (Diviners, Drowned Cities, Raven Boys). But once the list was expanded, they fell quite a bit lower in the estimation of voters. Is it the series issue? Or were the wrong books in the initial vote for the winner?
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As you may remember, we really struggled to figure out a way to establish a readable shortlist for our Mock with enough lead time to give everyone a chance to, you know, read the titles, which was why we did what essentially amounted to a binding straw poll with our initial Pyrite nomination list. But we suspect that the initial poll that led us to ten titles was unduly influenced by readership and books people really wanted to read, a suspicion that seems supported by Me & Earl‘s showing in the honor vote.
Now, that could also just reflect the different standards for honor votes vs winner votes, or it could be attributable to the change in voting populations over the course of the week. But still, this confirms that we don’t want to artificially shorten the list so much next year and risk losing the best of the best to an early poll when readership was still low. Would those of you who have been participating be willing to read closer to 15-20 books for the Pyrite, provided we can find a way to get the list (or some portion of the list) assembled earlier in the year?
Ah, things to chew on when the dust settles.
In the meantime, congratulations to Rachel Hartman, Margo Lanagan, John Green, and A.S. King! Because while a Pyrite prize is in no way mistakable for a Printz Award, the Pyrite does come from the heart…of many, many passionate readers!
And now, let the nail biting commence, because the RealPrintz, which is the one that really matters, is in 12 hours. 12 hours! See you on the flipside!
*The Pyrite Printz, or Pyrite, is the Someday My Printz Will Come mock Printz deliberation, and should not in any way be confused with YALSA’s Michael L. Printz Award, often referred to here as the RealPrintz or Printz. Our predictions, conversations, and speculation about potential RealPrintz contenders and winners reflect only our own best guesses and are not affiliated with YALSA or the RealPrintz committee. You probably figured that out on your own, but we like to make it clear!
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